Haunted house movies: the "old dark house" and its fake ghosts
In the first haunted house films the ghost was usually a crook. Eight films, from a 1932 storm to a house nobody can sell.
By Relay, Watch Guide · Tuesday, November 10, 2026 · 7 min read
A haunted house movie is a horror film in which the building is the threat: a place that traps the people inside, hides a secret and will not let them leave until morning. Its oldest form has a name, the "old dark house", a mystery or horror story set in an isolated, spooky building. It began in the theatre. Moria Reviews traces how the stage of the 1920s built a whole genre of thriller comedies set in large gloomy old mansions, with hits such as The Bat and The Cat and the Canary, and how film took them over from the mid 1920s.
The surprise is that the ghosts were usually fake. Moria Reviews says the supernatural in these stories is always revealed to be mundane, and one critic's rule is that if the terror comes from actual ghosts, it is not an old dark house film. The ghost was a crook, a greedy relative or a killer behind a sliding panel.
Two films set the pattern. Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary opened in New York on 9 September 1927, and the film historian Carlos Clarens called it the cornerstone of Universal's school of horror. James Whale, the director of Frankenstein, then filmed J. B. Priestley's 1927 novel Benighted as The Old Dark House in 1932. The BFI and TCM find in it the staples horror still uses: a stranded group, a remote house, secretive people inside and a howling wind. The Rocky Horror Picture Show played with the same clichés in 1975. Relay lists 168 films tagged haunted house, and the eight below follow the house from a crook's hiding place to a home where the dead really do stay.
What makes an old dark house
- A storm and no way out. Strangers are stuck for one night, by the weather, a will reading or a bet.
- Secrets in the walls. Hidden doors, secret passages and portraits whose eyes seem to move.
- A household hiding something. Servants, heirs and relatives who each have a reason to want someone gone.
- A scare with an explanation. In the classic form the ghost turns out to be human. Later films let the dead stay.
8 haunted house movies to watch
The Monster Walks (1932)
A young woman returns to her late father's estate with her fiancé for the reading of the will. At night an unseen hairy hand reaches for her. The culprit is a servant who has been whipping the ape kept in the basement, and the "ape" is really a chimpanzee that her father used in experiments in his basement laboratory.
Critics at Moria Reviews and Movies Silently both say it borrows its plot from The Cat and the Canary: relatives at a will reading, a targeted heiress and, Moria notes, the killer's arm reaching from a sliding panel. Martha Mattox, who plays the housekeeper, essentially repeats her role from the 1927 film. Britain's film censor rejected it in 1932 and passed it only in 2010, with the advisory "mild threat and violence".
HorrorThe Monster Walks
Frank R. Strayer · 1932 · 60 min
Spooks Run Wild (1941)
The East Side Kids were a low-budget comedy series that the producer Sam Katzman started at Monogram in 1940. Here the boys are stranded at a deserted mansion where a magician, a hunchbacked assistant, a missing girl and a sleepwalking boy turn the night into a haunted house chase. The magician is Nardo, played by Bela Lugosi, who had played the title role in Universal's Dracula.
Writers call it the first film to team Monogram's two biggest draws, Lugosi and the Kids. It was shot in about 10 days in August 1941 and released on 24 October, a week before Halloween. Lugosi's caped magician is the boys' prime suspect for the local "monster killer", which in an old dark house is the surest sign that someone else did it. The formula came back in Ghosts on the Loose in 1943, with the Kids in a house they think is haunted and Lugosi as a Nazi spy leader using it as a hideout.
Spooks Run Wild
Phil Rosen · 1941 · 64 min
The Ghost and the Guest (1943)
Newlyweds give up their honeymoon to stay at a rundown farmhouse. The caretaker is a retired executioner, a coffin delivered to the door holds an escaped convict who hides in a secret passage, and before long gangsters and police are piling into the house too.
It came from PRC, Producers Releasing Corporation, among the cheapest studios in Hollywood, and opened on 19 April 1943. The screenplay is by Morey Amsterdam, a comedian later known for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Reviewers file it under "old dark house comedy", and it runs through the form's stock gags: the ex-hangman caretaker, the coffin at the door and the secret passage.
The Ghost and the Guest
William Nigh · 1943 · 55 min
Nightmare Castle (1965)
Here the dead are real. A husband tortures and kills his wife and her lover, then plans to marry her rich, fragile stepsister, drive her mad and take the fortune. The murdered pair return from the grave. The Italian title, Amanti d'oltretomba, means "Lovers from Beyond the Tomb".
Barbara Steele, the British actress who became the face of Italian gothic horror after Mario Bava's Black Sunday in 1960, plays both the wife and the stepsister. Mario Caiano shot it in 18 days at the 17th century Villa Parisi, and Ennio Morricone wrote the score a year after A Fistful of Dollars. The US version was cut, and the full Italian film came back on a Severin DVD in 2009, then on a 2015 Blu-ray restored from the original camera negative.
HorrorNightmare Castle
Mario Caiano · 1965 · 103 min
Ghosts of Hanley House (1968)
Dick owns Hanley House and cannot sell it because of its reputation, so he bets a car that Hank cannot last one night inside. Hank brings company, including a medium, and the party turns into a séance. In the film's backstory, only two people ever survived a night there: one went mad, and the other hanged himself a few months later.
Louise Sherrill wrote and directed this tiny independent film, and two reviewers note she never wrote or directed another. Fangoria, the horror magazine, says little is known about the film and even less about her. It survived through small video labels: one reviewer credits Sinister Cinema and Alpha Video with keeping it from being lost, and it later reached Blu-ray from American Genre Film Archive and Something Weird Video.
Ghosts of Hanley House
Louise Sherrill · 1968 · 85 min
The Selling (2012)
An honest real estate agent tries to flip a haunted house, and finds the market is the scary part. Gabriel Diani wrote it and plays the agent. The director, Emily Lou, a Bay Area theatre director making her first feature, had studied with Diani at San Francisco State University. It premiered in the Late Show program of the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival and reached video on demand on 21 August 2012.
The joke has a real case behind it. In Stambovsky v. Ackley, a New York court in 1991 let a buyer cancel a house purchase because the seller had publicly reported ghosts. In the old dark house the ghost was a cover story. In this one it is a problem for the listing.
The Selling
Emily Lou · 2012 · 90 min
The Fall of Usher (2021)
Edgar Allan Poe's story The Fall of the House of Usher first appeared in September 1839, and in it the house is as much a villain as any person. Poe's narrator says the name Usher meant both the family and the family mansion, and at the end the house splits and sinks into a dark lake, so the house and the bloodline fall together.
Brian Cunningham, a Kentucky filmmaker who made the horror film Wretch, keeps a William Usher caring for an ailing father but drops Roderick, Madeline and the collapsing mansion. In their place, the lead reads passages from Poe's story straight to the camera, so the words carry the doom the house once did. It premiered at the 2021 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
The Fall of Usher
Brian Cunningham · 2021 · 95 min
The Haunting of Julia Fields (2023)
A young woman from a small town moves out on her own for the first time, hoping for a new start, and finds that her new home has something sinister in it. The film opens with a "based on a true story" claim, and its trailer repeats it.
Moviedelic, a review site, found no trace of a real case behind the claim, and says none of the filmmakers or actors has named one. The label is an old horror habit. History.com points to The Amityville Horror, where a lawyer in the case said the story was created over many bottles of wine. Joseph Mazzaferro, a Tampa Bay director and producer, builds many of his films on true-story framing, from Dybbuk Box: True Story of Chris Chambers in 2019 onward.
The Haunting of Julia Fields
Joseph Mazzaferro · 2023 · 71 min